Star Trek Deep Space Nine

On 3rd January this year, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. We finished watching the show at the end of last year. My impression, in general, is that pre-Discovery it was the most divisive Star Trek television series (it might still be; do many people actually think that Discovery is good?) and I’m keen, once we finish watching Voyager and (I guess) Enterprise to get into some of the writing about it (and other Star Treks). Thus far (midway through season 3 of Voyager), it’s certainly my favourite Star Trek – but then again, I was never much of a Star Trek fan. The long-running narrative of broken people trying to come to terms with their pasts as the future looks increasingly bleak? That’s much more my television-style.

I meant to write something to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary, but I never got around to it. I’ve been delaying reading this Variety article on the show for a couple of months, too, but I finally got around to that today as well. I’ve only watched the show once; I don’t really have a favourite episode about which I could write anything more insightful than I’ve read from other people. But back in October 2017 I wrote about the worst episode of DS9 – at least according to IMDb.[1] In (belated) celebration of the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, here is what I thought of that:

Twenty Seventeen was a strange year. After the political turmoil of 2016, we started facing the repercussions of those choices, which were largely – but not exclusively – terrible. From my perspective as a citizen of the UK (albeit one who lives in Canada), the political highlight came just after 5pm EST on Thursday 8th June when, after a dispiriting build up the exit poll from the General Election revealed a hung parliament with Labour gains in extraordinary places. Nevertheless, this was not a victory (depending on how you define victory, that is); it was, however, a salient reminder that we must not give up hope, and that fighting towards a better future is always a good idea.